Author

Date of Award

Degree Type

Degree Name

Department

Committee Chair

Jonathan Barron

Committee Chair Department

English

Committee Member 2

Martina Sciolino

Committee Member 2 Department

English

Committee Member 3

Charles Sumner

Committee Member 3 Department

English

Abstract

The absence of criticism on Robert Frost's "The Draft Horse" suggests that it is a challenge to Frost scholarship. This reading views Frost's strange and neglected poem as a return to a monomyth offered by James Frazer's hugely influential The Golden Bough. In "The Draft Horse," Frost reconsiders the concept of ceremonial sacrifice that undergirds Frazer's encyclopedic study of world culture and, by performing ceremony as a kind of modem poesis, Frost complicates the hero/sacrificial object role and critiques the progressive ideology that grounds Frazer's account to fashion a troubling epic for modern America that implicates its national readers in a kind of savagery.